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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, April 24 2012 @ 03:57 PM EDT |
That is assuming general-purpose changes of uniform quality and interest to
upstream and extensive enough that downstream does not want to be burdened with
continuing maintenance. One of the main points of Free Software is the ability
to adapt software to particular purposes.
GPL has been created firmly in the "Free Software" frame of mind, and
that is a mind focused about downstream: any recipient of software is supposed
to receive the software in no unnecessarily crippled state, and that means full
source, whether the software is employed on a single system or a million of
them: every user, whether it is one or a million, shall have the software
freedoms.
Fluffy feel-good concepts like "give back" or "community"
are more the prerequisite of the "Open Source" camp. They tend to
prefer licenses that give redistributors more choices, then moralize and lecture
the redistributors about which choices they should be ashamed of taking. Of
course, if the moral obligations are not spelled out in the license, one needs
to use suggestive terms in order to keep people in line.
But that is not the kind of thinking that the GPL is based on. Terms like
"community" suggest an inner circle that should be entitled to
software rights, while non-community members be excluded. The GPL and the
philosophies around it make no such difference. Software users don't need to
participate in any community to be entitled to the rights the GPL grants to the
public.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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